Chapter 9

"Can you explain the footage from the hospital corridor? The footage where you tell the nursing staff that any level of blood draw is approved?" He picked up one of the documents and dropped it in her lap. "Or the recorded statement from the clinic director, who confirms that the level of — intervention — applied to my wife was significantly beyond what I authorized? That you contacted him directly and told him it was at my explicit request?"

"Damian—"

"They killed our son," he said. "You gave the order to kill our son."

"That's not—"

"That's exactly what it is." His voice was absolutely level. "And my wife is dead."

The room was very still.

Then Celeste lunged forward and grabbed his sleeve. "I did it because I love you! I've always loved you! You were using her — you told me that yourself, you said she was just a—"

"I was wrong," he said. He removed her hand from his sleeve. "I was wrong about everything. And none of it matters now."

He turned and walked out.

He went back in.

There was no logic to it. The report was clear. The DNA match was confirmed. He had read the document. And yet he went back into that room and stood over Celeste and said: "The footage. All of it. I want you to confirm, on record, exactly what you told the hospital staff."

Celeste had collected herself somewhat in the five minutes he'd been gone. She tried again — the eyes, the voice, the version of events where everything was a misunderstanding, where it was the clinic director lying, where she'd only wanted to help, where love made people do desperate things.

He played her the footage.

She went very quiet when she heard her own voice from the corridor outside the neonatal ward: The child's there as a donor. Whatever they need, take it. I'll cover anything that goes wrong.

"I loved you," she said, finally. It came out stripped of its usual performance — just a flat, honest statement. "I've always loved you. If she hadn't been in the way—"

"She wasn't in the way," he said. "She was my wife. She was the person I should have—" He stopped.

His phone rang. He looked at the screen. His operations manager.

He answered.

He listened for forty seconds.

He sat down.

The phone call was from one of the private investigators his team had been running in parallel — and the footage they had pulled from the clinic, the Whitmore Psychiatric Clinic, had captured something the formal inquiry had not yet surfaced. Twenty-three days of it. Lily in the clinic. What had been done to her.

His operations manager walked him through it, item by item, with the measured precision of someone who had worked with Damian long enough to know how to deliver information efficiently and without visible emotion.

When it was done, Damian was looking at the wall.

"The clinic director's statement," he said.

"He confirms that Celeste contacted him separately. She told him the level of intervention was at your direct and explicit request. That you wanted it escalated." A pause. "He has a text message chain."

Damian turned and looked at Celeste.

She was already pressing herself back against the headboard.

In his mind, he saw Lily on the floor of Blackwood Manor's corridor — the blood in her hair, the careful way she'd dragged herself upright — and how she'd looked the one time he'd let himself meet her eyes in that period, a look he'd interpreted as obstinacy. He understood now what it had actually been.

She had been surviving. Just surviving. With every resource she had.

Celeste had reached for him. He looked at her hand on his sleeve.

"I remember," he said, "that you were on your knees in front of me once, and I gave you nothing." He removed her hand. "I gave her nothing when she was in the same position."

He stepped back.

"Every single thing you did," he said, "I'm going to ensure you understand it from the inside."

He arranged it through private channels and he did not explain it to anyone.

The first week: a private fertility clinic, the same procedures that Celeste had ordered for Lily, administered by medical staff who understood that this was not subject to interruption or modification. Celeste screamed until she lost her voice. Damian stood on the other side of a glass window and watched without expression and said, periodically, into the intercom: This is week one.

The second week: a specialist in bone marrow diagnostics. No anaesthetic. Celeste lost consciousness twice. Both times, she was brought back to full awareness before the procedure continued.

The third week: the Whitmore Clinic. The same wing Lily had been in. The same staff. The same protocol.

On the seventh day of the third week, Celeste was past asking for mercy. She was simply asking to die.

Damian came into the room. He was holding the infant — Thomas, the child they'd made in the worst way imaginable — and he sat down across from her and looked at her without speaking for a moment.

"Thomas is being placed with a family," he said. "He'll have everything he needs. He'll be educated and comfortable and cared for. You will never see him again."